In a new Youtube Video from Northrop Grumman, the F35′s Augmented Reality helmet “DAS” is demonstrated and described. Coordinating data from 6 IR sensors mounted on the exterior of the aircraft, the plane becomes invisible to the pilot and factors like daylight, fog, and illumination become non-issues. Like Gizmodo says:
The panorama inside the helmet effectively makes the F-35 completely invisible to the pilot. In fact, he will be invisible to himself: If he looks down to his legs, he won’t see anything but the ground. He will be able to look to any direction and get a clear view of what is happening, day or night. And not only the image is crystal clear at all times, but it also gets overlaid with information from the targeting system.
The Next Big Future site has dug up at nice 19 page PDF from Wired’s DangerRoom discussing what the “Super Soldier” of 2030 could look like, intended to generate dialogue and discussion on what it could be. Near the beginning of the discussion is a great piece on human endurance and training which discusses the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality systems.
Augmented and virtual environments will be ubiquitous and will support almost every facet of warfare including communications, data visualization, system control, and training. Soldiers will be able to move seamlessly among real, augmented, and virtual environments. Using virtual reality (VR) systems and serious gaming technologies will be the primary mode of delivery for personnel selection and training. Training will be embedded and available anytime, anywhere. The training would be augmented with the use of intelligent software agents and modeling and simulation tools resident on every Soldier system type, giving them analytic and decision-making capabilities that dwarf what is currently available to major command posts and rearward C4ISR centers.
3 Phoenix Inc is the proud recipient of a $10 Million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (SBIR Phase3) to provide software and technology to the US Government. Specifically it’s for topic number N04-138, “Real-time data fusion and visualization interface for environmental research data”.
Glad to see the US Government spending some money to improve visualization support. See the full announcement after the break.
Pixar recently announced v2 of Renderman Studio and v3.0 of RenderMan for Maya, and now the free eval is open for RenderMan for Maya. Simply visit their site and follow the instructions (Register for their Forums), and get your free eval. The evaluation has no time limit. So what’s new:
Built on the common foundation of Pixar’s core rendering technology, both releases feature substantial performance enhancements for production rendering, including faster multi-threading, optimized ray tracing, and other enhancements that will dramatically impact most scenes. New levels of customization will allow studios the ability to develop their own unique pipelines, and both releases provide full Maya 2009 compatibility. In addition, RenderMan Studio 2.0 offers premium features such as a new version of Pixar’s shading program, Slim, with many significant enhancements for creating sophisticated and high quality visuals looks.
The Heart Hospital, London, commissioned Glassworks to create a functioning 3D model of the human heart. After 2 years of hard work, it is complete.
Through a chance meeting at a dinner party 2 years ago, Glassworks were asked to create a Virtual Heart Simulator that allows the user to interact with an animated, realistic, anatomically accurate, ‘virtual’ 3D model of the heart in real time. The brief required the operator to be able to control the orientation of the heart and make planar slices in any orientation through the heart on the computer screen. From these slices the operator would be able to show the anatomical relationships between the various internal and external structures of the heart.
This Simulator would produce a real-time rendition of a photo-realistic computer graphics heart that could be sliced interaxially on any plain and produce a completely authentic graphic ultrasonic representation of that plain instantly.
After a month of beta, CUDA 2.2 is now released. The CUDA Toolkit, SDK and Drivers are now all available for download. New in this version:
Visual Profiler for the GPU
Improved OpenGL Interop
Texture Pitch Linear Memory
Zero-Copy
Pinned Shared Sysmem
Asynchronous Memcopy on Vista
Hardware Debugger for the GPU
Exclusive device mode
They’ve also added support for the upcoming Windows7 from Microsoft. This version also has significantly performance improvements to make using the GPU for Rendering & Computations simultaneously much faster.
With so many data visualization and analysis tools moving online, the first issue for most developers is how to make it interactive? This usually comes down to Flash or Silverlight (sometimes Java). Over at webnhance, they have a great breakdown of all the differences between Flash & Silverlight, coveringf languages supported, Video and Audio codecs implemented, animation theories, and more.
N-Sided announced Quidam3 back at NAB, and now they have free trials available for download. Simple go to their site and enter your email address for a 30-day free trial, with a few limitations:
NBC Bay Area has an interview with some of the guys at ILM about their contributions to the new Star Trek film. Over an hour of effects and no CG physical models, which has long-been one of ILM’s biggest strengths, John Goodson talks about some of the new design they developed for the movie.
3 Phoenix Inc
Pixar recently announced v2 of Renderman Studio and v3.0 of RenderMan for Maya, and now the free eval is open for RenderMan for Maya. Simply visit their site and follow the instructions (Register for their Forums), and get your free eval. The evaluation has no time limit. So what’s new:
N-Sided 
NBC Bay Area has an interview with some of the guys at ILM about their contributions to the new Star Trek film. Over an hour of effects and no 
VizWorld.com 
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